/lit/ - Literature

>All the "auto-didacts" I know are pseudo-intellectual scum.
Mostly that is my experience as well, but that doesn't mean that it has to be like that. Here's what you do:

>Read.
>Read more.
>Remember that you have not 'figured it all out'.
>Repeat.

More specifically, if you want a quick intro to the history of philosophy, my advice would be to read Sophie's World, and then look up the philosophers on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/)) as you go. Then, for more depth, the absolute minimum works to read are:
>Meditations on First Philosophy - Descartes
>Prolegomena - Kant (in this work, he essentially just explains his larger work Critique of Pure Reason)
>Tractatus Logico Philosophicus - Wittgenstein
The third of the above might be contended by others in this thread as being an obligatory, but I know they will not disagree that it is a major work.
Some other stuff, like Hegel, Heidegger or the Greeks (including both the pre-Socratics and the later ones) will probably be easier to get a grip of from secondary literature (go to your local library, or go to Stanford).

If it's society in general you're into, I'd recommend starting with 1984 by Orwell, and Brave New World by Huxley. If you want, Huxley also published another work called Brave New World Revisited, where he explains and compares the two works to each other (but take it easy with that book, some parts of it are rather just early Cold War paranoia).
If you're into the more philosophical aspects of modern society, I'd recommend Contemporary Political Philosophy by Will Kymlicka.

Other than that, pick up on reading your local intellectual newspaper - preferably the only weekly ones (as they have a tendency to put out more "news for the sake of news").

I know it's not much, but my professor in ancient and medieval philosophy recommended these translations:

- Plato: Meno and Phaedo, translated by D. Sedley og A. Long, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011
- Aristotle: Selections, translated by T. Irwin og G. Fine, Hackett Publishing Company: Indianapolis, 1995
- Machiavelli: The Prince, translated by F. Wolder, Helikon: Hasselager, 2004
- Bruno: Cause, Principle and Unity - and Essays on Magic, translated by R. J. Blackwell og R. de Lucca, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998